


Out of Love

by maggiemerc



Series: How To Process Plane Crashes And Other Catastrophic Events [15]
Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Angst, F/F, post-episode
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-28
Updated: 2013-05-28
Packaged: 2017-12-13 06:39:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/821202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maggiemerc/pseuds/maggiemerc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Callie and Arizona return home after the storm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Out of Love

**Author's Note:**

> The final vignette for my season 9 series. Check out Tumblr if you're curious about the status of Causal Fallacy and Hamilton Gregg, and if you're looking for something waaaay less angsty you should read my OUAT series. THERE ARE DRAGONS. AND NO LAUREN BOSWELL.

She never set out to fall in love. Falling in love required commitment--devotion--she knew she wasn't capable of. She was a badass surgeon flying from case to case and saving lives and offering a bright smile and the lovers she took were moments of peace. They were escapes from tiny coffins and dead brothers and damn it. 

Damn it, she never set out to fall in love.

But then this orthopedic surgeon ran into a bathroom while trying to hide her tears and she'd heard all about the woman. She was in awe of her and the way she'd been assaulted by the world and the way she'd stood strong in spite of it all. So she gave chase and she offered her own opinion. She uttered words of comfort and wonder and she pressed her lips to hers.

And then. Then she was falling in love and there wasn't a net and there weren't hand holds to grab and halt her fall. There was only the mad descent into a life she’d never planned and never wanted and loved despite it.

But one day.

One day she fell again. Her stomach was in her throat and her body was being tossed through the air and her leg was striking metal and all of her was shattering. 

Shattered.

She died. 

Out there in the woods she **died**. What she loved and what she hated and what she needed and what she could live without all shifted. She was no longer one woman. She was another. Reborn on an operating table and minus a limb.

She’d never set out to fall in love, but she had. Then…then she found herself out of love and adrift. She pulled one way. The woman she loved pulled another.

They fought for each other. 

They fought for those two idealists who had said their vows in a garden. Fought for the lovers that faced a gunman and a car crash and the betrayal wrought by an entire freaking continent.

They fought.

But neither of them were those women.

She’d changed.

Callie changed. The Callie who loved was lost and in her place there was the fighter.

Callie sacrificed **everything** for love. She sacrificed part of Arizona for it.

And Arizona.

Arizona had never wanted love in the first place.

 

####

The sun rose on a world she abhorred. Branches and leaves lay in puddles on the ground and people stumbled into the light and pulled the remnants of the storm off their cars.

They got in.

They drove away.

Arizona stood there. Her leg was tired and all her weight was on her good leg and the arm she gripped the window seal with. She’d come home. She and Callie both had. They’d put Sofia in her bed and they’d shared a breakfast in silence.

Then Callie had cried and Arizona had only watched.

How could you comfort someone when you were the source of their pain?

Their roles had been reversed.

Arizona had spent a year trying to love her wife again when all she could feel was the anger and she'd finally found a way to love her only to hurt her so severely because the lights went out and a seductive blond told her it was all okay. Now Callie hated **her**. Callie felt betrayed by **her**. She was the one ruining them and Callie was the one searching for the strength to love again.

Her leg wobbled so she limped to the couch and took off her pants and removed her prosthetic. She let it fall on its side and she rolled onto her back and lifted her thigh so the sunlight caught the end of it.

"It all comes back to the leg." Callie's words were in her head. Callie's horror. 

"The leg."

Like it was just a piece of meat.

Like it was just an impetus to life.

Like it was nothing.

That leg had been **her's**. It held her up when she stood on the tarmac and watched them wheel her brother's body off the plane. It held her up through twenty hours of surgery. It burned with every mile of the marathon she'd run in college and it had ached when she broke it falling out of a tree as a ten year old. And it had stank in the woods. The sweet rot had pervaded the shelter they'd built from a plane.

She missed the toes that flexed and the knee that cracked and the way Callie used to run her sure, strong hand along the calf.

"The leg."

Callie didn't miss it. Didn't regret its loss.

Callie had chopped it off because Arizona's mind was more important. 

And she kept thinking it was okay. Kept thinking **Arizona** was okay. She'd shut her mind to what she'd sacrificed and just made it this--this lump of flesh. Not a loss. Not a devastation. Just "the leg."

The worst part was Arizona wished she could see it the same way. See it as the line between life and death rather than a part of herself. She wished she could see the failure to heal rather than feel her own failure and that of her wife so accutely.

She wished that storm hadn't come and she hadn't taken Lauren in her arms and she hadn't forgotten about betrayal and legs and planes for one moment.

She wished she could stand up, walk into the other room and just tell her wife she loved her.

But she was missing "the leg."

 

####

The best part about being the one that was always cheated on rather than the one doing the cheating was that Callie was familiar with the coping mechanisms.

The horror had given way to numbness and she was determined to sit in that numb place for as long as humanly possible.

It didn't hurt. There wasn't shock. There wasn't excruciating grief. There was nothing. There was the sun peaking through the crack in the door and the cieling fan overhead and the rise and fall of her own chest.

In the numbness Arizona wasn't the deliverer of everything perfect and everything awful. She wasn't a bitch. She wasn't cruel. In her head Arizona was a woman in the other room and Callie was a woman in **this** room and those were just facts. Easy and quantifiable facts.

Arizona had cheated on her.

Arizona had let some--some **stranger** see all of her while hiding it from Callie. For a little while someone else had understood Arizona more than Callie. Had comprehended every sigh and exhalation and brought her wife to points she'd only just rediscovered herself.

But she was so tired it didn't even hurt.

She'd fought for so long. She'd put aside her feelings and her instincts and she'd **fought** for Arizona.

And Arizona gave up.

So Callie laid on the bed and felt nothing because it was better than feeling something.

Later, and Callie couldn't say how much later, the door swung open and Arizona stood there on her one leg holding herself in the frame of the door with straining arms.

"I love you," she said simply.

Callie rolled over on her side.

"I love you Calliope Torres."

Was Arizona fighting? Was she actually trying to save a marriage she'd baled out of a year before?

"I will always love you."

Was she trying to break through that perfect wall of numbness Callie had built?

She sat up. Wiped at her weary eyes and stared at the woman who looked like the one she'd married.

"Callie…please."

Arizona was trying to be passionate. Trying to be assured. She wobbled on her leg and her arms flexed with the effort of holding herself up.

But mostly.

Mostly Arizona just looked exhausted. Looked as tired and numb as Calie felt.

She tilted her head--hoping maybe she'd see more than just exhaustion in the doorway. Instead she saw that thing that wanted to cut off her leg. She saw that angry creature she dragged into the shower. She saw all the women that had come after she lost her wife in a plane crash.

Arizona's arms slowly gave out and she slumped against the frame of the door and rested her head.

Here they were two strangers pretending to be people they weren't, and they were both so tired and as long as they stayed. As long as they were trying it would only get worse.

Callie twisted her ring on her finger. Saw the glint of Arizona's ring in the sunlight.

She sighed.

Then she said the words. The words that had to be said. Callie had fought for so long that that moment of surrender wasn't devastation. It was peace.

"I want to seperate."

And the woman who had once been her wife sank to the floor. Callie sank back onto the mattress.

And after a little while.

She slept.


End file.
